Arts & Culture
Strange Religion by Nijay K. Gupta
AROUND MY NECK hangs a cross made of polished pear wood and brushed steel. Growing up, I was taught that it was a timeless, universal reminder of Christian faith. But as Nijay K. Gupta reveals in a new book, Strange Religion, it can also be seen as a tangible reminder of another truth: The earliest Christians were weird.
As Gupta writes, “Weird is not always bad ... weird can be good. But weird can also be dangerous.” This danger was precisely why the earliest Christians were regarded with suspicion, even fear, by the Romans. “Christians had no temples, no priests, and no cult statues,” Gupta writes. “They had no sacred legends or texts of their own in the first century. ... They went out and intentionally tried to spread their religious practices far and wide.” Because the power of the Roman Empire depended on the strength of its civic religion and practices, “this naturally brought [early Christians] under suspicion” by the authorities. A threat to the religious status quo was seen as directly undermining the stability of the state.
Gupta focuses his latest book on the decades after the crucifixion when the church was becoming established.
Unholy Power
Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Carl Byker’s short documentary, For Our Daughters, displays the evangelical church’s dangerous pattern of protecting abusive men — from the pulpit to the White House — to maintain social and political power, often to the detriment of women. www.forourdaughtersfilm.com
From Dìdi
THERE IS SOMETHING horrendous about the politics of being 13 — the raging hormones, the prepubescent brinkmanship; nobody knows what they’re doing, and everyone wants you to think that they do. Such is the case for Chris Wang (played by Izaac Wang), aka Wang Wang, aka Dìdi, aka Half-Asian Chris (he’s not actually half-Asian). Chris is having a bit of an identity crisis.
Director Sean Wang’s Dìdi is a love letter to adolescence rendered with painstaking specificity, a period piece set in his own childhood home of Fremont, Calif., during the era of T9 texting and AOL instant messenger.
It’s the summer before freshman year in 2008 and Chris is getting into shenanigans: skating with his friends, wondering if he should send a :) or a ;) to his crush, and generally feeling emotions nobody else could possibly understand. Plus, his mother keeps arguing with his grandmother and asking if he’s feeling sad — so annoying. And his sister, who sucks, obviously, is leaving for college, but at least she has good taste in music (or rather, she likes the same music as Chris’ crush).
There is such frenetic volatility to early adolescence.
'Conclave' / Focus Features
Directed by Oscar-winner Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), Conclave begins when the pope dies unexpectedly. To elect the next pontiff, the College of Cardinals convenes in the Vatican, entering total seclusion from the outside world until a majority vote can be reached. But if God is working through the cardinals, so too is something darker: ugly hunger for power and bitter ideological divide.
Titus Kaphar. Courtesy Revolution Ready Films. Photo by Mario Sorrenti.
In the first few moments of Exhibiting Forgiveness, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) is beaten after he defends a store clerk in a convenience store robbery. The violence, like most of the violence in the film, is just out of view. Soon the scene shifts and Tarrell (André Holland) wakes from a nightmare. His wife Aisha (Andra Day) reassures Tarrell that he is safe in the beautiful world they are building for themselves as artists and parents.
'La Llorona' / El Ministerio de Cultura Y Deportes de Guatamala / La Casa de Production / Les Films du Volcan
Horror fiction is one of the first spaces to grapple seriously with concerns of justice. (No, really!)
With that in mind, I present five movies you can watch during spooky season that will not only thrill and chill you, they’ll also spur you to think and act for justice.
‘Leap of Faith’ / Picturehouse
In August 2022, Mennonite minister Rev. Michael Gulker brought together 12 pastors of different denominations from Grand Rapids, Mich., with a unique proposal — to spend a year together exploring their differences with the hope of finding a way beyond them.
Credit: Unsplash/Jayson Hinrichsen
When my friend introduced me to pop artist Chappell Roan this past April, I had no idea who she was. Now, nearly six months later, I hear about Chappell Roan (the stage name for Kayleigh Rose Amstutz) daily. From drawing massive crowds at Lollapalooza to having one of the most streamed albums of the summer, Roan’s quick rise to fame has been impressive.
My friend described Roan as the “situationship singer.” A “situationship” a term coined by Generation Z, is a noncommittal or undefined romantic or sexual relationship. “Casual,” the fifth track on Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, grieves a situationship. In it, Roan describes a relationship that fails to evolve into something beyond a pattern of casual, sexual encounters. There’s a confession in Roan’s bridge that’s so honest and unexpected, that it took me by surprise upon first listen. She says, “I try to be the chill girl that / Holds her tongue and gives you space / I try to be the chill girl but / Honestly, I’m not.”
For those who grew up in the conservative Christian world as Roan did, lamenting casual sex is familiar territory. But Roan and other Gen Zers aren’t lamenting casual sex, hookup culture, or situationships because they believe their “sexual purity” is tied to their salvation. Rather, they seem to be lamenting a sex-positive culture that doesn’t live up to the hype.
'Shōgun' / Disney
As a missiologist and practical theologian, I can’t help but appreciate the multiple depictions of an embodied faith throughout the drama, in patterns of both faithfulness and dysfunction.
Image of Flamy Grant. Photo by Sydney Valiente. Graphic by Candace Sanders/Sojourners.
Flamy Grant called in to her morning interview after participating in a day-long silent retreat. Well, not a silent retreat exactly — it was a vocal rest.
After spending the last year touring the U.S. off the success of her album, Grant, who prefers to use her stage name in interviews, needed to rest her voice. Since her rise to Christian music stardom — or infamy, depending on how one feels about a drag queen topping the Christian charts — she has performed in bars, clubs, and churches spreading the good news in glitter.
Illustration by Melanie Lambrick
AS A JOURNALIST trained never to bury the lede, there is a snake in my house. It’s a distressing creature that slithers away into parts unknown when you try to capture it. The presence of this snake is deeply disturbing. Yet no matter how close I come to grabbing it — even with Grill Pro’s extended-length barbecue tongs (18 inches is as close as I’m going to get) — it always gets away, only to appear again in a different location.
It’s my fault, of course. Years ago, I allowed the creature into my house as a show of support for a granddaughter to whom all life is sacred. The Supreme Court also believes that all life is sacred, depending on which state you live in. But even if I took the reptile across state lines, I’d have to catch it first (with the above barbecue tongs), which I haven’t.
Illustration by Vartika Sharma
I once believed I could hate intermittently,
an incandescence I could turn on and off
with the will or guide with the pressure
of my knees or with reins woven
from the clear demands of the moment.
Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
THE WORD “PROPHETIC” gets thrown around a lot in Christian circles. The adjective carries both an ancient heft and a forward-looking fire, the perfect jolt of biblical energy for the nouns that need it: a prophetic book, a prophetic sermon, a prophetic Instagram infographic. But living prophets, especially the self-anointed ones, aren’t so easily marketable. They’re stubborn and strange, somehow arrogant enough to believe they speak for an invisible God who turns out to be, more often than not, extremely angry at large swaths of humanity.
Two-Step Devil, the second novel of rising literary voice Jamie Quatro, places one such character in the contemporary South. Known simply as The Prophet, Quatro’s lonesome protagonist lives in the kudzu-entangled backwoods of northeastern Alabama, where he paints visions of impending holy war on junkyard scraps. He’s the kind of person who can “walk around behind the world’s curtain” — glimpse the spiritual stakes behind the drudgery of familiar, if fragile, social conditions. After rescuing a teenage girl from a sex-trafficking scheme, he’s confident he’s found the one who will deliver his apocalyptic message to the White House. While he’s frail and tormented by self-doubt, she’s young and, in his eyes, innocent. Meanwhile, the girl, Michael, must pull off an urgent mission of her own.
Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion
“LOOK FOR SHOOTING stars,” I texted my daughter who was working nights last August. After getting home around 3 a.m., she and her friend watched the annual Perseid meteor shower from our yard in rural Georgia. They saw a few faint streaks in the sky but nothing spectacular. Her friend was bleary-eyed and ready to go in, but Zora kept her eyes on the horizon. Then it happened: A streak of white with a smoky blue tail hurtled through the sky and took their breath away. Several years ago, my husband saw a similar meteor, one that lasted long enough for him to proclaim throughout its sparkly display, “Holy smoke!!!”
Meteor showers are not the only luminous rewards for those who walk in darkness. Leigh Ann Henion’s new book Night Magic (Algonquin Books) serves as both guide and advocate for honing our night vision and waiting long enough to be surprised. Synchronous fireflies, luminescent glowworms, and fragrant night-blooming flowers are among the many wonders illuminating Henion’s Appalachian nocturnal habitat
From the Madang podcast
Living Room Theology
Hosted by theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim, the Madang podcast features erudite conversations with scholars, ministers, activists, and more. Named after the courtyards found in traditional Korean homes, the show provides an inviting, intimate space to envision a more just world. The Christian Century
Sahlan Hayes / Fairfax Media / Getty Images
I WAS VISITING my sister and niece in Maine with my middle daughter when we learned that Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon died. Our aunt in Oakland sent the obituary to our mom in Ohio, then Mom texted us: “Thought immediately of you both and all that she and her music meant to us. Long, lovely memories.”
Even in the news of her passing, Reagon, the founder of the celebrated music ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, was connecting women across generations, geography, religious, and racial categories. The music of Sweet Honey helped my mom, a white Quaker woman and Methodist pastor from rural Ohio, find her voice. It also shaped my sister and me as biracial Black women growing up in Washington, D.C. in the ’80s and ’90s. I took a course from Dr. Reagon during my senior year in high school. I never saw her again. Waves of grief and gratitude washed over me.
The day we got the news, we woke in a tent after camping near where the sun rises first over North America. As we drove past towering pine trees, taking in the news of one more passing — each death stirs up the sadness of all the other losses and more to come — my sister and I played our favorite Sweet Honey songs. We sang along to Reagon’s “I Remember, I Believe” from the 1995 Sacred Ground album: “My God calls to me in the morning dew / The power of the universe knows my name / Gave me a song to sing and sent me on my way / I raise my voice for justice, I believe.”
Photograph by Kirth Bobb
WHEN RAHIEL TESFAMARIAM was 5 years old, she and her mother flew from Eritrea to New York City, arriving in the United States with six-month tourist visas to help prepare for Tesfamariam’s eldest sister’s wedding. After the six months had passed, Tesfamariam’s mother began packing clothes for a return trip to Eritrea, but Tesfamariam adamantly refused to leave. Tesfamariam’s brother recalls being at the airport and watching their mother step to the gate; Rahiel stepped back and said, “Bye, Mommy.” And so it was: Rahiel Tesfamariam remained in the United States in the care of her siblings, out of the shadow of the Eritrean War of Independence, with an expired travel visa.
The rest of her story could be told this way: She became a legal permanent resident of the United States, graduated from Stanford University, became the youngest-ever editor in chief of The Washington Informer, received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale University, and launched Urban Cusp, an online community for Black millennials interested in the intersection between faith, culture, and justice. Tesfamariam worked as a columnist for The Washington Post; led #NotOneDime, a national Black Friday economic boycott during the 2014 Ferguson protests; and was named by Essence magazine as one of its “New Civil Rights Leaders.” She got married. She became a mother. It could be said that Tesfamariam pulled herself up into the American dream.
Tesfamariam’s book Imagine Freedom: Transforming Pain into Political and Spiritual Power (Amistad), released earlier this year, tells that story, but with a difference. Telling only that version, like the American dream itself, would be insufficient. Tesfamariam spoke with Sojourners associate editor Darren Saint-Ulysse in April about how she carries Africa within, political power’s ephemeral nature, and God’s command to free the captives. — The Editors
From Perfect Days
ONE WAY TO take a culture’s temperature at a given moment is to look at the art it produces. This is particularly true in film — a visual medium and a business largely driven by audiences’ perceived interests. Movies reflect their times, not just visually, but thematically.
Films made during the Great Depression, for example, included social realist dramas like Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple who lose their home to foreclosure, and works of optimistic patriotism like Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where Jimmy Stewart brings his determined charm to Capitol Hill. Others, like Capra’s romantic comedy It Happened One Night, offered troubled moviegoers good-natured escapism.
So, what’s on our minds recently, cinematically speaking? Among other things, a pandemic, corrupt institutions, international tragedies, and (another) contentious election year. There are many reasons viewers might want to escape into simpler or more fantastical worlds.
One recent trend, however, has surprised me: movies about presence.
Dorcas Cheng-Tozun and Trish O'Kane
DORCAS CHENG-TOZUN, author of Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul (Broadleaf), wanted to be an “unceasing voice” for social justice. “And while I was busy saving the world,” she writes, “I would also be the kind of person who’d happily sacrifice anything for a good cause.” But 10 months after Cheng-Tozun moved from the U.S. to China to set up an operations office for her spouse’s solar business, thrilled at the possibility of providing affordable electricity to billions of people, she experienced the “worst and longest panic attack” of her life. For more than a year, she could do “little more than sleep and cry and journal.” A crucial, difficult question arose: “Why can’t I handle what everyone else seems to be managing perfectly well?”
For Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World (Ecco), the breaking point was Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed her New Orleans home and neighborhood. “After a disaster,” O’Kane reflects, “you just can’t do as much. Nor should you. You need time to think, to ponder ... I needed a great slowing down.” She took up knitting, spent long hours outdoors on the ground “watching the clouds change shape and bumblebees loading their back legs with pollen and the yard birds going about their business.
Like Cheng-Tozun’s year of sleeping, crying, and journaling, these months surfaced life-changing questions for O’Kane. “I could feel my question changing,” O’Kane writes, “from What should I do? to How should I be?”
In their respective books, Cheng-Tozun and O’Kane write from the other side of activist burnout — something Cheng-Tozun experienced after working for multiple social justice organizations, and O’Kane after working in human rights journalism in conflict areas, both for many years. Both writers ponder how to change, heal, and move forward. Birdwatching was the gateway for O’Kane, while Cheng-Tozun found herself reflecting on sensitivity, introversion, and the many ways people are wired with different gifts to offer. They have different backgrounds and stories — Cheng-Tozun is now a writer and consultant who most recently worked for a Christian nonprofit that equips BIPOC contemplative activists; O’Kane is an environmental educator who created the “Birding to Change the World” program at University of Wisconsin-Madison — but both authors offer a similar invitation to those who yearn to make a difference: Learn to embody gentler, more sustainable ways of doing so.
Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION is a relatively new invention — though prefigured by the Cross, it was Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and a million others whose names we don’t know or remember who introduced this technique to us over the course of the 20th century. There’s no handbook for how it’s done, and no West Point equivalent — which means that we largely proceed by trial and error as we try to move the conscience of the world. We make it up as we go along. Which is fine, but you must be honest about what works.
Over the last year, one tactic that climate activists have tried is attacking cultural works — iconic paintings, right up to the “Mona Lisa,” and great shrines of humanity, most notably Stonehenge. They’ve been responsible, figuring out ways to do minimal damage, and perhaps such methods were worth a try: When you’re losing, you throw Hail Marys. And the people who carried out these actions clearly should not be subject to ridiculously punitive sentences.